Physicists say there may be a way to prove that we live in a computer simulation - by George DvorskyBack in 2003, Oxford professor Nick Bostrom suggested that we may be living in a computer simulation. In his paper, Bostrom offered very little science to support his hypothesis — though he did calculate the computational requirements needed to pull off such a feat. And indeed, a philosophical claim is one thing, actually proving it is quite another. But now, a team of physicists say proof might be possible, and that it's a matter of finding a cosmological signature that would serve as the proverbial Red Pill from the Matrix.

And they think they know what it is. According to Silas Beane and his team at the University of Bonn in Germany, a simulation of the universe should still have constraints, no matter how powerful. These limitations, they argue, would be observed by the people within the simulation as a kind of constraint on physical processes.

So, how could we ever hope to identify these constraints? Easy: We just need build our own simulation of the universe and find out. And in fact, this is fairly close to what the physicists are actually trying to do. To that end, they've created an ultra-small version of the universe that's down to the femto-scale (which is even smaller than the nano-scale). And to help isolate the sought-after signature, the physicists are simulating quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which is the fundamental force in nature that gives rise to the strong nuclear force among protons and neutrons, and to nuclei and their interactions.

To replace the space-time continuum, they are computing tiny, tightly spaced cubic "lattices." They call this "lattice gauge theory" and it is subsequently providing new insights into the nature of matter itself. Interestingly, the researchers consider their simulation to be a forerunner to more powerful versions in which molecules, cells, and even humans themselves might someday be generated. But for now, they're interested in creating accurate models of cosmological processes — and finding out which ones might represent hard limits for simulations.